Animating Data: A Different Way to Look at Marcellus Shale Drilling

At Rhiza, we love to experiment with new ways of visualizing data that help tell better data stories. In most of our work environments, using data is kind of difficult and visualizing is usually left to data experts. We’d love to see a future where sharing data visualizations (maps, charts, explanations, etc) is as easy as recording and sharing a video on YouTube. Not everything produced will be stellar in quality, but at least we’ll all be a lot further down the road towards breaking down the traditional data silos and moving data aggregation and visualization solely out of the hands of database admins and graphic designers. We’ll still need those folks, their jobs will just get a lot more fun!

To this end, when I saw a data animation created by John Detwiler that showed the spread of drilled Marcellus shale gas wells in Bradford County, I wanted to create my own data animation telling the same story, but for the entire state of Pennsylvania. I recruited Jeff Christensen here at Rhiza to work with me on creating a visualization that would not only show the locations of the drilled wells over time, but also visualize the number of wells drilled per month. The video below is the result of that work:

At Rhiza, we’re working on making this entire process a lot easier for our customers (like the great folks at FracTracker.org), but there’s always more work to be done. We’ll keep you informed as we make progress towards our company’s goal of making it so easy that anyone can do it.

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Rhiza is pioneering the way media companies generate revenue with data. With Rhiza for Research and Rhiza for Marketing, media companies better understand their audience, their content and their advertisers by visualizing, analyzing and sharing information derived from disparate data sets. Rhiza for Ad Sales delivers detailed recommendations based on integrated consumer insights. Rhiza, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, is used by the most progressive media brands, including: BBC Worldwide, Comcast, Univision, Cox Media, and Cox Automotive. For more information, please visit rhiza.com.